The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

from Paguate to a small land-grant Chicano village nearby,
where she lived until her marriage at eighteen. But Sanchez was
not raised in a traditional Indian home; her mother, a Laguna,
married a non-Indian, and so Sanchez was raised in a distinctly
multicultural, multilinguistic, Roman Catholic environment. Her
Laguna grandmother, who lived next door, had married a Jewish
immigrant from Germany (her second marriage), and Sanchez’s
father is an Arabic- and Spanish-speaking Lebanese-American.
The languages she heard from infancy were English, Spanish,
Arabic, Laguna and Acoma, German, and occasionally Navajo
and Zuni. Her home mixed the foods and knowledge, viewpoints
and customs of most of these groups and did so often with little
regard for their derivation. If her poetry reflects a multiplicity of
consciousness, it simply reflects her early life. But beneath that
multiplicity rests a single-minded bias toward Laguna
understandings and values, a bias that shows most clearly in her
continuing insistence on proper order and in the very complexity
of her thought.
Sanchez’s work is difficult for many because it is so blatantly
Indian; it does not bow to common misconceptions about Indian
people, ever. She seldom panders to popular stereotypes about
Indians; her poetry never wears feathers, and she never says
“ugh,” except to laugh ironically at notions of Indianness that
have been formulated by non-Indian apologists and borrowed
from them by Indian writers. While many Indians writing
contemporary poetry and fiction use white-generated stereotypes
in their work with no apparent sense of the source of those
images, Sanchez does not. As a result, her work can be
dismissed as “not Indian.” Many believe that to be Indian is to
be romantic, naive, inarticulate, and intellectually primitive (or
noble, depending on the mode of dismissing our intelligence).
In Indian cultures in general, abstract thinking was practiced
by women while representational thought was practiced by men.